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The Surveillance Data Standards Management and Harmonization Steering Committee (SMaHSC) is proposed to be a CDC-wide governance group that promotes collaboration and coordination across CDC’s surveillance data standards and data harmonization practitioners to help CDC achieve its vision for Public Health Surveillance in the 21st century. The purpose of SMaHSC is to increase the visibility of public health surveillance data standards management and harmonization activities across CDC, identify challenges, and prioritize opportunities for surveillance data harmonization and standards adoption. The SMaHSC will serve as an authoritative body for cross-program surveillance standards management, implementation, and data harmonization by providing strategic oversight and advocating for initiatives that will impact standards use, adoption, effectiveness, and data harmonization practices that are mutually valuable across program areas. SMaHSC will serve as the decision-making authority jurisdiction that authorizes the use of “preferred” in the Vocabulary Service. In doing so, SMaHSC will observe the basic tenets of good governance, which are participatory, consensus-oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, equitable, and inclusive.
Purpose
A methodical approach to marking content in the Vocabulary Service as “preferred”, such as the one described here, will ensure that the SMaHSC:
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This process is meant to be used as a starting point by the Standards Management and Harmonization Steering Committee ( SMaHSC ) or its equivalent, when such an organization is established.
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SMaHSC when established will support CDC’s mission to protect the public’s health and will align to the Public Health Surveillance Strategy. The goals of the SMaHSC are as follows:
- Increase transparency and coordination of standards management and harmonization activities.
- Identify and collaborate on resources needed for standards management and harmonization activities.
- Promote public health surveillance data standards adoption.
To achieve its goals and objectives, the SMaHSC will:
- Identify and support priority areas for standards management and harmonization.
- Establish a communication mechanism, which is understandable and accessible by both surveillance practitioners and public health informaticists, in order to improve understanding comprehension of surveillance data standards management and harmonization activities.
- Integrate CDC’s strategic priorities on managing surveillance standards and harmonizing surveillance data by facilitating collaboration and coordination for surveillance practitioners and public health informaticists.
- Promote shared resources and educational opportunities on standards.
- Encourage data harmonization through vocabulary repositories, such as reviewing content in the SDP Vocabulary Service to promote reuse.
- Initiate cross-program working groups to increase understanding and solve challenges regarding standards management and harmonization.
- Report to the Surveillance Leadership Board on progress and challenges and make recommendations on standards and harmonization priorities, as well as other steering committee activities.
SMaHSC membership will represent a broad range of CDC expertise and , perspectives, and familiarity with the public health surveillance data needs, initiatives, and priorities of external stakeholders including surveillance partners (e.g., State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial partners, CSTE, APHL), standards development organizations (SDOs) (e.g., SNOMED, LOINC), and other government agencies (e.g., Office of Management and Budget, Office of the National Coordinator).
Voting membership will have the knowledge, skills, and experience from at least one of the groups described below:
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Content that can be marked as “preferred” in the Vocabulary Service includes questions, response sets, sections (groupings of questions) or SDP-V surveys (grouping of sections). "Preferred" content in the Vocabulary Service is selected through an established process as the way CDC prefers wants to collect data for a particular concept. Designating content as "preferred" helps to standardize surveys and other data collection efforts, which reduces the response burden of CDC partners and simplifies data collection, analysis, and reporting.
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SDP-V Label | Proposed definition | Goal |
Preferred | Surveys, sections, questions, data elements, or response sets that have been formally approved by SMaHSC or another CDC authority as the chosen and vetted characterization of a concept within SDP-V | User can easily find and reuse with reduced review time |
Similar To | Degrees or alternatives or synonyms of content | User can review options that are alike in meaning |
Do not use | Content that should not be used | User generally will not use |
The label “Preferred” is presently available in SDP-V. The other terms will require further development. The governance process addresses the first label and can easily be used for the other two.
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- Curator of the SDP Vocabulary Service: This person is envisioned as an authoritative overseer of content in the Vocabulary Service, identifying informal consensus on specific content as well as synonymous content. The curator will be responsible for tagging content as “preferred”.
- SMaHSC Coordinator for preferred review: This person will review the standard form that proposes content as "preferred" and ensures that it is complete. This person may also poll stakeholders as to their preferences thoughts on the proposal or may delegate the task. He or she will then forward the completed proposal with stakeholder comments to the SMaHSC membership for their action.
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- SMaHSC Members: The members of SMaHSC will be identified as described in the charter for the group. The charter also describes the voting process.
- Stakeholders: Stakeholders are specific to each proposal as users of the SDP-V content under consideration. They will likely have already participated in the harmonization activity that resulted in the recommendation of "preferred."
Standard Form for Proposing “Preferred” Content
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The standard form will explain why the content should be flagged "preferred." Supporting artifacts such as a harmonization work group report might be included. Artifacts should include the business case for the designation of "preferred standard", the problem it solves, and the proposed SDP-V specification. It will list all known key stakeholders who will be affected by the change. It is likely that the key stakeholders were part of the harmonization work group that made the recommendation to begin with. It may include programs, individuals, systems, or documents. Forms lacking a mandatory field will be returned to the proposer. An sample form for a SMaHSC "preferred" proposal is pictured below.
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SMaHSC will solicit each stakeholder’s approval for adding the tag “preferred” to the identified Vocabulary Service content and will document it along with comments on the form as part of the proposal review process.
SMaHSC Evaluation
The proposal with stakeholder feedback will be distributed to the members of SMaHSC, who may invite other stakeholders to provide input on the changerequest.
SMaHSC voting members will decide to approve or deny the proposed change, voting in accordance with the SMaHSC charter. The charter states: “Decisions shall be reached by achieving a simple majority of Voting Members present at a meeting. In the event of a tie vote, the Co-Chairs will have the deciding vote, or may call for a re-vote after further discussion by the Committee.” The decision will be documented on the form, which will become part of the committee’s working files.
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